A Constitution to Control Government, Drafted by People Who Controlled Their Emotions – Part 1
Expanding liberty by restraining passions.
America is unique in being governed by the longest-lasting written Constitution. It’s also unique in that its Constitution was drafted by people who trained themselves to control their emotions. Jeffrey Rosen, in his book The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America, presents the fascinating story of how the founders of our country liberated a nation by keeping their own spirits in check and crafting a system of checks and balances designed to do the same for America.
Rosen writes:
Ben Franklin … wrote in The Pennsylvania Gazette. “Reason represents things to us not only as they are at present, but as they are in their whole nature and tendency; passion only regards them in the former light.” The classical [mostly Roman] authorities viewed the pursuit of happiness as a daily version of the famous marshmallow test, an experiment on delayed gratification conducted at Stanford in 1972. Researchers gave the subjects, who were children, a choice between one immediate reward (such as a marshmallow) or two rewards for those who could wait fifteen minutes to receive them. The study found that children who were able to wait for two marshmallows rather than eating one immediately performed better in school years later and had better life outcomes … [T]hroughout American history, the meaning of the pursuit of happiness has evolved in unexpected ways. The ancient wisdom that defined happiness as self- mastery, emotional self- regulation, tranquility of mind, and the quest for self- improvement was distilled in the works of Cicero, summed up by Franklin in his thirteen virtues, and used by Adams in his “Thoughts on Government.” After Jefferson inscribed the idea in the Declaration of Independence, it showed up in The Federalist Papers, the essays Madison and Hamilton wrote in support of the Constitution, focusing on the promotion of public happiness. It was evoked by Presidents John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln, as well as by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, to defend the ideal of self- reliance and to advocate for the destruction of slavery. It became the basis of Alexis de Tocqueville’s idea of “self- interest properly understood” and of Justice Louis Brandeis’s idea of freedom of conscience. The ancient wisdom fell out of fashion in the 1960s and in the “Me Decade” that followed, however, when our understanding about the pursuit of happiness was transformed from being good to feeling good. But the classical ideal of happiness was resurrected and confirmed in the 1990s by insights from social psychology and cognitive behavior therapy, which found that we can best achieve emotional intelligence by developing habits of emotional self-regulation … Following the classical and Enlightenment philosophers, the Founders believed that personal self-government was necessary for political self-government. In their view, the key to a healthy republic begins with how we address our own flaws and commit to becoming better citizens over time. In The Federalist Papers, Madison and Hamilton made clear that the Constitution was designed to foster deliberation so that citizens could avoid retreating into the angry mobs and partisan factions that can be inflamed by demagogues. Only by governing their selfish emotions as individuals could citizens avoid degenerating into selfish factions that threatened the common good. The way for citizens to create a more perfect union, the Founders insisted, was to govern themselves in private as well as in public, cultivating the same personal deliberation, moderation, and harmony in our own minds that we strive to maintain in the constitution of the state. Madison would have urged us to think more and tweet less. In this sense, the Founders believed that the pursuit of happiness regards freedom not as boundless liberty to do whatever feels good in the moment but as bounded liberty to make wise choices that will help us best develop our capacities and talents over the course of our lives. They believed that the pursuit of happiness includes responsibilities as well as rights -- the responsibility to limit ourselves, restrain ourselves, and master ourselves, so that we achieve the wisdom and harmony that are necessary for true freedom.
In previous essays, we explored the practical benefits of a stoic approach to life. And as Rosen explains, the Founders were practical people who quickly came to appreciate the classical virtues. Regarding John Adams:
The Stoic Epictetus … argued that we should avoid judging others or taking offense at their judgments of us. Because we can’t know or control someone else’s motives, thoughts, or actions, we should instead focus on controlling our own. “Oh Stoicks you are wise,” Adams wrote … It’s remarkable how much of [John and Abigail Adams’] long correspondence, which began in 1762 and ended with Abigail’s death in 1818, involves their mutual quest to govern their emotions. “Patience my Dear! Learn to conquer your Appetites and Passions!” Adams wrote to Abigail in one of his first letters, in April 1763 … [T]he idea that the government of the passions is more important than the management of Kingdoms comes straight from the Bible. (“He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty,” says the proverb that Abigail loved to quote, “and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.”) Adams’s reference, however, is to the Stoics. “Did you ever read Epictetus?” he asked Abigail. “He was a sensible Man.” “Whoever, therefore, wants to be free, let him neither wish for anything, nor avoid anything, that is under the control of others,” Epictetus taught, “or else he is necessarily a slave.”
Adams was an early American proponent of a system of checks and balances:
Adams insisted on the importance of mixing and balancing the three social orders—represented in England by the king, the lords, and the people—until the end of his life. “The fundamental Article of my political Creed,” Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, “is, that Despotism, or unlimited Sovereignty, or absolute Power is the same in a Majority of a popular Assembly, and Aristocratical Counsel, an oligarchical Junto and a single Emperor.” For this reason, in his Thoughts on Government [written in 1776], he recommended a complicated system of checks and balances: the popular house would elect an aristocratic council, and the two bodies, in turn, would elect a governor, with all three bodies subject to annual elections. Adams insisted that annual elections would teach the people’s representatives “the great political virtues of humility, patience, and moderation, without which every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey.” At the same time, Adams worried that the people might lack the virtue necessary to sacrifice their self-interest for the public good, or res publica. He turned to classical Rome to suggest protective measures that the new government could pass to encourage virtue, including term limits, an independent judiciary, publicly funded education … Adams had faith that, through self-restraint and education, the people could cultivate the habits of personal self-government necessary for political self-government. “Laws for the liberal education of youth,” he insisted, would inspire “good humour, sociability, good manners, and good morals.” Adams’s conclusion was that by promoting virtue through education, a republic could fulfill its primary end: to increase the happiness of the people.
Although John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were long political rivals (until their friendship was rekindled later in life), they shared a classical philosophy. Rosen describes Jefferson as follows:
“Determine never to be idle,” [Jefferson] wrote his daughter Martha from Marseilles, France, in May 1787. “No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing.” Writing again two weeks later from the Canal of Languedoc, where he was sailing, Jefferson told his daughter that if she ever was bored, it was her own fault. He was determined, he said, to see both his daughters “developing daily those principles of virtue and goodness which will make you valuable to others and happy in yourselves” as well as “acquiring those talents and that degree of science which will guard you at all times against ennui,” or boredom, which Jefferson called “the most dangerous poison of life.” According to Jefferson, “[a] mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe for felicity. The idle are the only wretched.” Warning Martha to practice the harpsichord and avoid gambling, he stressed that in a world with so many useful and amusing employments, “it is our own fault if we ever know what ennui is.” … Jefferson’s most systematic attempt to codify his life lessons about industry, virtue, and happiness came in his list of twelve virtues, which he called “cannons of conduct in life.” He sent the list to his granddaughter Cornelia Jefferson Randolph and later shared the list with friends starting in 1817:
never put off to tomorrow what you can do to-day.
never trouble another with what you can do yourself.
never spend your money before you have it.
never buy a thing you do not want, because it is cheap . .
take care of your cents: Dollars will take care of themselves!
pride costs us more than hunger, thirst and cold.
we never repent of having eat[en] too little.
nothing is troublesome that one does willingly.
how much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened!
take things always by their smooth handle.
think as you please, & so let others, & you will have no disputes.
when angry, count 10. before you speak; if very angry, 100.
… He then set out a challenging, ten-hour-a-day reading schedule that seems to have been modeled on Jefferson’s own Pythagorean reading schedule as a student. It was divided into five parts … After dark came belles lettres, rhetoric, criticism, and oratory, including Shakespeare (to “learn the full powers of the English language”) and the orations of Demosthenes and Cicero. Jefferson recommended learning the habits of deliberation by preparing orations on hypothetical cases, working with “any person in your neighborhood engaged in the same study” with “each of you” taking “different sides” of the same case.
Most of us are familiar with the words of the Declaration of Independence that read “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Fewer are aware that the Declaration goes on to recommend revolution if a government starts to work at cross-purposes to the people’s happiness, stating “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” But what exactly did the Founders understand “happiness” to mean? As Rosen explains:
The phrase “a pursuit of happiness” occurs in chapter 21 of [John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding], in a discussion of what Locke, following Cicero, calls the “powers” or “faculties” of the mind. Section 50 of that chapter is called “A Constant Determination to a Pursuit of Happiness No Abridgment of Liberty.” Section 51 continues: “The Necessity of Pursuing True Happiness, the Foundation of Liberty.” These sections are central to Locke’s discussion of our power to use our faculties of reason and judgment to master the emotions that lead to uneasiness of mind. Our will is not entirely free, since it is determined by our desires, which Locke (following Cicero) defines as “an uneasiness of the mind for want of some absent good.” But although we don’t have the freedom to determine our desires, we do have the freedom to decide to act on our desires or not. For Locke, virtue and—by extension—happiness aren’t about eliminating our passions but about dealing with them realistically by focusing on our long-term interests rather than our short-term desires. According to Locke, the “successive uneasiness of our desires” often misleads us into “pursuing trifles”—that is, short-term gratification—instead of the infinitely greater good that will lead to our long-term happiness. When our minds are possessed by any “extreme disturbance” or “violent passion,” such as anger, he says, “we are not masters enough of our own minds” to “consider thoroughly” our true interests. Locke defines liberty as the freedom to deploy our powers of reason to think twice before acting on our “impetuous uneasiness.” By avoiding “a too hasty compliance with our desires” and through “the moderation and restraint of our passions,” we can pursue the choices on which “true happiness depends.”
As Jefferson understood it, the notion that freedom of conscience was an unalienable and inherent right of all people derived from the aspiration that people’s rational nature would come to trump their tribal tendencies, such that they would feel compelled to follow their own understanding of truth, independently acquired:
“Well aware that the opinions and belief of men depend not on their own will, but follow involuntarily the evidence proposed to their minds,” Jefferson began, “Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint.” In other words, Jefferson agreed with [Francis] Hutcheson [the Irish moral philosopher] that freedom of conscience is, by definition, an unalienable right— one that can’t be surrendered or alienated to government— because our opinions are the involuntary result of the evidence contemplated by our reasoning minds. We can’t give presidents, priests, professors, or fellow citizens the power to think for us, even if we wanted to, because we are endowed by our Creator with the capacity to reason and therefore can’t help thinking for ourselves. Madison supported Jefferson— and relied explicitly on Hutcheson— in his “Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments” in 1785, where he called the right to freedom of conscience “in its nature an unalienable right.” As Madison explained, “It is unalienable, because the opinions of men, depending only on the evidence contemplated by their own minds cannot follow the dictates of other men.” … Having reviewed the books on Jefferson’s reading list, we can understand in a new light the list of twelve virtues that he sent to his granddaughter after his retirement from politics. It’s notable how closely Jefferson’s “cannons of conduct” track not only Franklin’s list of virtues but also the lessons of classical moral philosophy about the pursuit of happiness.
This understanding of “the pursuit of happiness” worked its way into the psychology of the Constitution:
As the historian Daniel Walker Howe observes in his essay “The Political Psychology of The Federalist,” Madison and Hamilton treated self-interest as a selfish passion when it was directed at short-term gratification but as rational when it took the long view. In his invaluable book on the faculty psychology of the Founders, Howe further notes that just as the mind has faculties of reason, prudence, and passion, so, according to The Federalist, the state includes a small group of natural aristocrats (who govern based on reason), a larger group of people who can discern their enlightened self-interest (prudence), and still larger masses of people driven by a desire for immediate gratification (passion). The separation of powers in government should be designed to mirror the separate faculties of the human mind, recognizing that long-term wisdom, tranquility, and happiness require careful checks and balances among the faculties. In other words, the Founders believed that harmony that results from a well-tempered Constitution mirrors the harmony of a well-tempered mind. But instead of balancing the monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, as ancient Constitutions had done, the American Constitution would balance the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, each of which corresponded to a different faculty of the mind. The executive branch, with the power of the sword, wielded force; the legislative branch, with the power of the purse, possessed will; and the judicial branch, as Hamilton wrote in “Federalist No. 78,” had “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment,” corresponding to the faculty of conscience that could resist the impulses of unreasonable passion. By the same token, the president could check the impulsive passions of Congress with the veto, just as the more aristocratic Senate could cool the passions of the more democratic House. The goal of all these institutional checks was to slow down deliberation so that large groups of people could achieve the same long-term thinking in the body politic that individuals sought to achieve through virtuous self-mastery … In a famous passage, Madison defends the separation of powers by invoking the principle of counteracting passions. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” he wrote in “Federalist No. 51.”“The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” Madison assumed that the president, Congress, and the judiciary would resist encroachments by the other branches on their powers because of their ambition to maintain their own power and prestige.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore the wonderful example of the reconciliation between political rivals John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.